The good news is my Barracuda is completely finished except for a line running from the throwout bearing to the master cylinder. I even got to hear the engine run (it sounds awesome). I dropped off the final part yesterday (getting it will be the subject of another story) and supposedly it will be installed today or early next week and I'll pick up my car on Wednesday... YIPEE!!!!! Except... I'm not happy with the work. The quality is great - very professionally done, the manual transmission with the pistol grip shifter looks like a factory installation, the radiator was relocated to make room for the clutch fan, etc. The problem is the price. When I got an estimate for the work, I was quoted 27 hours of labor. I'm being billed for 57 hours. When I asked why so many hours, they told me they ran into a lot of problems that had to be corrected and weren't figured in to the original estimate. OK, I'm aware of that. I had to sign a couple of authorizations for extra work... but 30 fricken' hours over the estimate????? They showed me all the work tickets submitted by the technician, and sure enough they added up to 57 hours (actually over 57 hours) so do I have a valid complaint. HELL YES I have a valid complaint.
When I take a car to a shop, I expect that they know ehat they're doing and estimate their time acccordingly. In this case, I was told that not only could they do the work, they had done another conversion just like mine. In other words, they should have known what was involved when they gave me the estimate. I talked to some friends about this and some of them have the opinion that if the work needed to be done, I shouldn't have a problem paying for it. I disagree. As a customer, I took their estimate in good faith and I think they should know what they're doing when they give the estimate. If THEY screw up on THEIR estimate, I'M not the one who should pay for the screw up. What really makes me mad is that this is a shop with an excellent reputation, and besides that they told me they'd done the same conversion before. Now though, the work is done and I'm stuck paying for 30 extra hours of labor I didn't think I was going to have to. If they had given me an accurate estimate to begin with, I might have shopped around a bit more for a different shop or I might have had the work done at the same shop but waited and saved up more money. At least I could have given my wife an accurate cost figure before she agreed to spend the money.
I feel like I got ripped off. The work was done nicely, I wasn't billed for work that wasn't done, but their estimate was about $1800 too low - $1800 I wasn't expecting to pay, $1800 to explain to my wife, $1800 they should have told me about before the work even started.